Washington (October 29, 2024) - Senator Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.), a member of the Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee, today sent a letter to Mark Zuckerberg, Chairman and CEO of Meta, on the company’s failure to launch an academic research initiative on its platforms’ impact on the 2024 presidential election. In 2020, two of Meta’s platforms, Facebook and Instagram, launched a partnership with 17 researchers to investigate social media’s impact on the 2020 presidential election. Although that research is ongoing, it has already produced high-quality and informative studies on Facebook and Instagram’s political impact. Meta is not undertaking a similar initiative this election cycle.
Senator Markey wrote, “Meta’s decision to enable independent researchers to study Facebook and Instagram’s impact on the 2020 election provided a critical window into the platforms’ impact on U.S. politics and the 2020 election. Thanks to this partnership, over the past few years, researchers have released important studies on Facebook and Instagram’s effect on political polarization, news knowledge, and turnout, among other measures, and the impact of different changes to Facebook and Instagram’s user experiences, such as switching certain users to a chronological feed of content, rather than an algorithmically determined feed.”
Senator Markey continued, “Four years later, although we have learned much more about social media’s impact, many questions remain unanswered, and Meta appears to have pulled back on answering them. With the presidential election just a week away, it may be too late to conduct the exact same type of research as was done under the 2020 initiative, but Meta still has significant data that can shed light on its impact on this election. Going forward, I urge Meta to once again lead the industry in transparency and ensure independent researchers have the access necessary to develop a better picture of social media’s impact on our elections, institutions, and democracy.”
The full text of the letter can be found HERE.
In July 2024, Senator Markey, along with Senator Chris Coons (D-Del.), Senator Bill Cassidy (R-La.), and their colleagues, sent a bipartisan and bicameral letter to Meta raising concerns about Meta’s decision to end access to CrowdTangle, a Meta-owned transparency tool that has allowed researchers and journalists to view and study public content on Facebook, Instagram, and other platforms on a wide range of issues, including foreign influence campaigns, terrorist threats, and mental health.
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